Arts Champions

Birmingham Opera Company is Arts Champion for the Ladywood Constituency and works with Birmingham City Council to get more people involved in a wide range of arts activities in the neighbourhood and beyond.

Associate Artistic Director, Richard Willacy is leading on this project for Birmingham Opera Company and he's been busy supporting the establishment of the Local Arts Forum bringing together the local constituency office, the ward committees and different community organisations to help increase participation and engagement at a grass roots level. This follows on from the hugely successful work he led in the Perry Barr Constituency covering Handsworth, Oscott and Perry Barr itself. We're still involved in several projects there - keep an eye out for Simmer Down in July - it's a day of fun, food, music and a big reggae festival and we'll be there getting people to sing along in our workshops

Ladywood is a challenging area with some of the poorest communities in the UK. Unemployment among young people is the amongst the highest in the UK now at 24%. We'll be focusing our work on engaging young people from 16-25 in our new projects and working at street level with local youth workers to contact young people and share our expertise for them to use in their own creative world - DJing, street dance, poetry.

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